Apparently, there is a Glazunov revival underway. From the '60s through the '90s, there was approximately one recording of each of his eight completed symphonies per decade. But there have been three recordings released of each symphony over the past five years, two by the Russian conductors
Aleksandr Anissimov on Naxos and Valery Polyansky on Chandos, and one by Japanese conductor
Tadaaki Otaka on BIS. Of these,
Anissimov's muscular performances have consistently been the best, while Polyansky's shallow performances have come in a distant second, and
Otaka's detached performances have come in an even more distant third.
Now it appears that there may be a fourth set of recordings in the offing. In 2004,
José Serebrier's coupling of the Fifth Symphony with the ballet The Seasons was released on Warner Classics with the
Royal Scottish National Orchestra and nominated for a Grammy award for best orchestral performance in 2005. As a follow-up, Warner released
Serebrier's coupling of the Eighth Symphony with the Suite from the ballet Raymonda, also with the
Scottish National. As with his previous release, however,
Serebrier's Eighth comes in an even more distant fourth. In the Eighth as in the Fifth,
Serebrier accelerates at crescendos, slows down at decrescendos, and lets the brass take the lead at climaxes, thereby turning a masterly essay in symphonic form into a series of special effects. And in Raymonda as in The Seasons,
Serebrier does all the same things, and the damage done to the ballet is even more detrimental than that done to the symphony, turning an already episodic score into a series of disconnected events. The
Scottish National plays with great power but less precision, and Warner's sound is clean but hard, dim in the pianissimos, and harsh at the fortissimos.